Taxpayers Lose $139 Mil on Al Gore’s Green Car

The Energy Department has sold off its $192 million loan guarantee to Fisker Automotive to Chinese billionaire Richard Li for $25 million — the biggest taxpayer loss on a green loan since the failure of Solyndra.

The DOE sold the loan to Li for $25 million after lending the financially troubled green automaker a total of $192 million since 2009.

How did Fisker get that $192 million? Just ask Al.

Fisker backers were also heavily involved in lobbying the Obama administration and Congress on green energy programs. The venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers — where Gore is a partner — was a seed investor in Fisker and spent $400,000 in 2009 and 2010 on lobbying. The firm lobbied in favor of the stimulus bill that handed out $90 billion for green energy programs.

Employees of KPCB have donated more than $2.2 million to political campaigns, mostly for Democrats, including President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks campaign contributions.

Other Fisker investors include Eco-Drive (Capital) Partners LLC, an investment consortium, and Qatar Investment Authority, a state-run investor based in Qatar.

So Al Jazeera’s oil tyranny was an investor in a Green car that got sold off at bargain basement prices to China. But as usual, American taxpayers were the biggest involuntary investors.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st century.

UCSPanther

This is why Green Energy will fail, and why people see it as a scam.

Keep wasting money on environmental snake oil, machinery that makes poor substitutes for proven and existing technology, and lining the pockets of dodgy businessmen like Gore, and you will guarantee that the public will be very unwelcoming of any new technology.

objectivefactsmatter

“This is why Green Energy will fail, and why people see it as a scam.”

Of course it’s a scam. How do you know? Because there is no objective definition to distinguish between “green” and any other “type.” It’s a political term with no clear definition. An electric car charged by a coal power plant is “green” because – no fossil fuels?

Really? OK. Environmental snake oil is exactly what it is.

hlauther

Word is, Fisker fell victim to a “perfect storm” of operational and financial setbacks, e.g., production delays, problems with a key battery supplier, the destruction of hundreds of vehicles as a result of Superstorm Sandy, etc. But we
rarely hear about these things when journalists write about the Fisker loan
default. Nor are we informed about what may have been the utter incompetence of the company’s executive staff, who certainly knew how to paint a bright financial picture when they requested the loan, but who apparently had little talent for following through. They knew that if whole thing went belly-up, the boo-birds would scream “government incompetence” and that they’d simply get another cushy job somewhere.